1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to apparatus and methods for remotely determining the location of such movable objects as automobiles, trucks, railway cars, ships and boats, (generically referred to as vehicles), and more particularly to apparatus and methods for determining the locations of such objects at a centralized control station by the processing of radio frequency transmissions from transmitters mounted on the objects.
2. Background Discussion
Information concerning the location of surface vehicles, ships, airplanes and the like is important for many reasons, including business, safety and security reasons. As is well known, the apparatus and methods used to determine the location of such objects have varied greatly over the centuries and have been greatly improved in accuracy and sophistication during the past several decades.
Historically, for example, early ocean navigators relied upon often extensive knowledge of ocean currents, prevailing wind directions and the positions of stars in the sky to determine their locations when out of sight of familiar landmarks, and to thereby chart their paths to intended destinations. Subsequent navigators had available chronographs, compasses, astrolabes and sextants by which to determine their approximate positions. Still more recently, ocean and air navigation has benefited from various types of radio location apparatus, including LORAN and variations thereof. Modern ships and aircraft may presently rely upon radar, inertial navigation apparatus and satellite navigation systems by which positional information can usually be determined with great precision.
Land navigation has generally been easier than ocean and air navigation, at least after traveled regions of the earth were accurately mapped. Known landmarks could always be relied up in determining positional locations on land; in unmapped or unfamiliar regions, ocean navigation apparatus and methods have been used.
Presently, at least under normal circumstances, the knowledge of one's location in most habited regions of the world is relatively easy for a vehicle operator to determine from available maps or by inquiry from local inhabitants. It is, however, generally a more difficult and costly problem for control centers remote from the vehicles to determine, at all practical times, the location of a number of vehicles which may be under direct or indirect supervision by the control center. Even assuming that the vehicle operators themselves know their vehicle locations, difficulties exist in continually providing such location information to a control center which may be responsible for supervising a great many vehicles.
Telephone communication of vehicle position on a periodic basis is, of course, possible and may, for example, be used by sales personnel who may otherwise routinely telephone their headquarters to report their activities and obtain messages. In many instances, however, frequent telephone communication is impractical and may, in any event, be very costly. Verbal communication from vehicle operators to a control center, by use of on-board, short wave radio transmitters, is frequently used to provide local area positions of trucks, taxi cabs, police cars, ambulances and fire trucks to central dispatchers. However, such radio communications are usually impractical for long ranges, are relatively costly on a per-vehicle basis and require operator intervention.
Various vehicle location systems of a more sophisticated nature have been disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,215,345 to MacDoran and 4,359,733 to O'Neill. The O'Neill patent discloses a satellite-based vehicle position determining system which utilizes coded radio signals from transponders carried aboard land vehicles and aircraft. Relay stations on artificial satellites are used to relay the radio signals from the vehicles and/or aircraft to a remote control station which uses time of signal arrival to determine vehicle or aircraft position. The radio signals from the vehicles or aircraft are, however, provided only in response to an interrogation signal sent to transponders on the vehicle and aircraft. Thus, in such systems, two-way communication with the vehicles and aircraft is required and each vehicle and aircraft thus requires both a transmitter and a receiver. When such equipment is already available for other purposes on the vehicles and aircraft, low vehicle location equipment costs may result. However, in most instances involving land vehicles, appropriate radio communication receivers and transmitters are not already provided and the cost of adding such equipment must accordingly be borne by the vehicle location system as part of the overall system cost.
The MacDoran patent discloses a vehicle locating system based upon the detection by several stations of radio signals transmitted from vehicles. Precise, time-formatted radio signal receptions from each station are retransmitted, after time-tagging, to a central station where the signals are cross correlated with all other signals to determine the time-differences-of-arrival from the vehicle for all possible station pairs. The central station processes the time differences of arrival data to locate the vehicle's position at the intersection of derived hyperboloids. As disclosed by MacDoran, noise characteristics of each transmitted pulse are utilized to determine the time differences of arrival from all pairs of receiving stations, the presence or absence of cross correlation signals being used for decoding the vehicle identity. All receiving stations must, however, be synchronized by a calibration beacon and the system is incapable of handling overlapping signals, the latter factor limiting the system, as stated in the disclosure, to no more than about 100 vehicles.
There exists, therefore, a need for a comparatively low cost vehicle locating system that has the capability for handling many thousands or millions of vehicles, as well as for a vehicle locating system that does not require special synchronization and does not require costly two-way communication apparatus.